New domain names coming soon to an Internet near you?
Nyc.nyc. Africa.africa. Sport.sport.What do the fictional domains above have in common? They could become real in the near future if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approves a list of hundreds of new domain name extensions. On November 9, ICANN will post its latest guidebook for applying for new top-level domains (TLDs). The guidebook is expected to be approved at the next ICANN board meeting, scheduled for Dec. 5-10 in Cartagena de Indias, Columbia. If approved, the corporation will begin accepting new applications in May 2011, and the sites could go up in 2012.New TLDs have been on ICANN’s to-do list for a whilein fact, since the corporation was founded in 1998. New domains extensions have been added twice in the corporation’s history: seven new ones in 2000 including .info and .biz and six new ones in 2004, including .asia and .jobs. That makes for a total of 21 generic top-level domains and 250 country-code TLDs. There are 196.3 million top-level domains registeredbut not every extension is created equal. In fact, almost 50 of those domains are registered with the original .com extension.The new domains can be between three and 63 characters long and can support Chinese, Arabic, and other international scripts. Paris (.paris) and Berlin (.berlin) both plan to apply for new domains, as does Latin America (.lat) and UNICEF (.unicef). The application process costs 185,000, regardless of whether the domain is approved. ICANN has announced a limit of 1,000 TLDs in the market per yeara monumental change compared to the 271 currently in existence. What new domains will make it in? And will they go the way of the .com, or the .jobs? Only time will tell.
Filed Under: Domain Names.
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